Customer satisfaction is a primary determinant of business success. Organizations not only gain competitive advantage by providing customers the highest levels of satisfaction, but they also increase profitability. The link between customer satisfaction and profitability has prompted many organizations to institute Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programs. CRM details many aspects of interaction that a company has with its customers. CRM generally includes a set of business processes that enable an organization to identify, select, acquire, and serve its customers.
With each technological advancement, especially the advent of self-service channels like the World-Wide-Web, customers are becoming more dispersed. Consequently, more organizations are beginning to manage customer relationships electronically. This requires constant innovation and continuous monitoring of user satisfaction.
Conventional techniques for determining user satisfaction involve obtaining explicit feedback from users. For example, explicit user ratings may be evaluated subsequent to customer interactions (or parts thereof). Often, traditional techniques for obtaining feedback and determining user satisfaction include surveys. The development, dissemination, and collection of surveys, however, is often time- and labor-intensive. Some organizations also dedicate staff to contact customers by telephone or meet with them in person to obtain feedback. Still others incur the expense of printing and mailing surveys in a direct mail campaign. All of these techniques suffer because they depend on a customer providing responses in the first instance, and providing honest responses in the second. Even an Internet or web survey, which may be less costly to administer, is only effective if customers respond and respond honestly.
Obtaining honest responses is a significant problem. Customers generally respond to satisfaction surveys only if they can discern some potential benefit. If a customer's perception of a product is so low to preclude further use, the customer will often not bother to respond to a survey. Yet these are the very people whose feedback is critical.